Technology certainly helps make our lives better in a lot of ways, but sometimes its abuse can make big problems even bigger -- like the way in which a French options trader appears to have lost $7.2 billion in a combination of bad speculating and computer hacking.

It has been absurdly cold lately, but not in a way that's all that different from historic terms. The state climatologist says we've been lulled into softness by the last five or six years, which have been unusually mild.